"Lost arts"
Apr. 14th, 2008 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenStill reading up on the aformentioned obscure old computers. Slightly saddened that nobody's even come close to guessing yet, so here are a couple more clues. And no trying to cheat by looking at the "what links here" page, mm'kay? It's at least one link away from them.
But in a more general sense, I'm wondering if any of those "senior geeks" - if you're over 40, you're probably in that category - feel as I increasingly do. That no matter how wonderful and splendid modern PCs are, when even a very modest PC lets me watch film clips, chat live with people half way across the world while manipulating files of hundreds of meg, all at once, that still, there were things that older machines, decades ago, did better in various ways.
The sorts of thing I'm thinking of are quite various.
- There seems to be nothing today to compare to the simplicity of a VAXcluster, for instance, where you didn't even need to know which machine of a group you were connecting to.
- 1980s network protocols needed a lot less configuring than TCP/IP does. OK, so I didn't have Ping or Traceroute, but on NetBEUI and IPX/SPX and DECnet and AppleTalk, I didn't have to muck around with addresses and subnet masks and name servers and gateways and all that. You plugged it in, it worked.
- Everything is in C now, so buffer overflows and memory leaks are a constant concern. Whatever happened to Smalltalk and so on, the dynamic languages which sorted all that out for you and let you edit live, running code?
- Everything is so slow these days. The last time I used a computer that felt really fast, it was running BeOS. No modern OS seems to let you feel the raw power; it's all being soaked up by layers of abstraction and hundreds of meg of supporting libraries. Where are the low-end OSs for legacy kit or thin clients that don't give you everything from fax to IPv6, that just do the necessary and no more? Even my Symbian smartphone feels lardy and sluggish compared to a 200MHz ARM running RISC OS!
- How come they're all so expensive? Where are the cheap-as-chips home computers for kids or the poor, so they can get in too? The EEE is all very well, but £250 is a fair wodge and it's a colour laptop, FFS. Where is today's Spectrum? The dead-basic, no-frills device for beginners?
- Complexity is a problem. For instance, look at the fall of Netware. V1 ran on proprietary kit; v2 ran on 286s and did much better. It could cold-boot itself and run non-dedicated. V3 couldn't do either, but it was still fairly simple. You installed it, bunged some disks into an array, made some user accounts and that's it, people could log in and start sharing. Netware 4 brought in directory trees and all that complexity and baggage, and the fall of Novell started. Great for enterprises, sh1te for small businesses, but every enterprise started as a small business once. NW3 you could work out for yourself; NW4 you needed study and training. Where are today's Netware 3s? I don't mean bally MS Small Business Server, which may be easy to get going but is vastly complex underneath and limited in various ways.
- Modularity. When things were put together from bits, you could take them apart as well. On NT3 & 4, and indeed Win9x, you could uninstall networking. This was great if you managed to bugger it up; you could remove the lot and start from a clean slate. Not any more. Now, you get a hundred free extras, but they're mandatory; you can't get rid of them if you want. I can't even remove Evolution from my Ubuntu machine without breaking the metapackage and suffering unspecified consequences.
- - - - -
So, what do you miss from the computers of decades gone by? What features are gone that you would like to see back on modern machines?
But in a more general sense, I'm wondering if any of those "senior geeks" - if you're over 40, you're probably in that category - feel as I increasingly do. That no matter how wonderful and splendid modern PCs are, when even a very modest PC lets me watch film clips, chat live with people half way across the world while manipulating files of hundreds of meg, all at once, that still, there were things that older machines, decades ago, did better in various ways.
The sorts of thing I'm thinking of are quite various.
- There seems to be nothing today to compare to the simplicity of a VAXcluster, for instance, where you didn't even need to know which machine of a group you were connecting to.
- 1980s network protocols needed a lot less configuring than TCP/IP does. OK, so I didn't have Ping or Traceroute, but on NetBEUI and IPX/SPX and DECnet and AppleTalk, I didn't have to muck around with addresses and subnet masks and name servers and gateways and all that. You plugged it in, it worked.
- Everything is in C now, so buffer overflows and memory leaks are a constant concern. Whatever happened to Smalltalk and so on, the dynamic languages which sorted all that out for you and let you edit live, running code?
- Everything is so slow these days. The last time I used a computer that felt really fast, it was running BeOS. No modern OS seems to let you feel the raw power; it's all being soaked up by layers of abstraction and hundreds of meg of supporting libraries. Where are the low-end OSs for legacy kit or thin clients that don't give you everything from fax to IPv6, that just do the necessary and no more? Even my Symbian smartphone feels lardy and sluggish compared to a 200MHz ARM running RISC OS!
- How come they're all so expensive? Where are the cheap-as-chips home computers for kids or the poor, so they can get in too? The EEE is all very well, but £250 is a fair wodge and it's a colour laptop, FFS. Where is today's Spectrum? The dead-basic, no-frills device for beginners?
- Complexity is a problem. For instance, look at the fall of Netware. V1 ran on proprietary kit; v2 ran on 286s and did much better. It could cold-boot itself and run non-dedicated. V3 couldn't do either, but it was still fairly simple. You installed it, bunged some disks into an array, made some user accounts and that's it, people could log in and start sharing. Netware 4 brought in directory trees and all that complexity and baggage, and the fall of Novell started. Great for enterprises, sh1te for small businesses, but every enterprise started as a small business once. NW3 you could work out for yourself; NW4 you needed study and training. Where are today's Netware 3s? I don't mean bally MS Small Business Server, which may be easy to get going but is vastly complex underneath and limited in various ways.
- Modularity. When things were put together from bits, you could take them apart as well. On NT3 & 4, and indeed Win9x, you could uninstall networking. This was great if you managed to bugger it up; you could remove the lot and start from a clean slate. Not any more. Now, you get a hundred free extras, but they're mandatory; you can't get rid of them if you want. I can't even remove Evolution from my Ubuntu machine without breaking the metapackage and suffering unspecified consequences.
- - - - -
So, what do you miss from the computers of decades gone by? What features are gone that you would like to see back on modern machines?
